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those that stayed were generally looked askance at by theborn Siberians.What really made modern Siberia was the unappeasableland hunger of the Russian peasantry and the coming ofthe railway. The flow of settlers, largely in defiance ofgovernment regulations, at times dwindled to a trickle,but in the eighteen-eighties it swelled mightily and theold methods of attempted governmental restriction werepalpably breaking down. The great famine of 1891and the building of the Trans-Siberian, begun in thatsame year, caused a gigantic* outpouring. The railway,like the Canadian Pacific built a decade earlier, turneda stream into a torrent. Despite ebbs and flows, despitethe Russo-Japanese war, the population of Siberia andthe Far East doubled within twenty years. In 1800there had been rather over a million people; the 1897census gave five and three-quarter millions; by 1914there were over ten millions, nearly half as many againas in Canada, and Siberian co-operatives were competingsuccessfully on the English butter market. This veryrapid expansion was mainly confined to Siberia proper,i.e. between Lake Baikal and the Urals. Eastwards ofLake Baikal the stream of colonists—whether by landor by sea half round the globe from the Black Sea ports—ran much lower, despite the inducements of thegovernment. Meanwhile, here in the Far East, Chinesemigration on a scale even larger than that into Siberiawas transforming Manchuria, the battleground of Russianand Japanese imperialism (cf. pp. 301-305).The Trans-Siberian and the mass movement eastforced the government to change its policy. A specialcolonization department was set up (1896) which attemptedto organize migration and settlement. Regulationswere poured forth on surveying, cheap transportrates, tax and other exemptions, grants in money andkind and loans. Nevertheless perhaps half of the incomerscame on their own, weary or suspicious of thedelays and complexities of bureaucracy. They camemostly from the overcrowded northern and centralblack-earth lands; usually in large groups, not toobadly off; preceded by 'locators' to discover suitable55